


It Is Truly Fitting

by elijah_was_a_prophet



Category: Original Work
Genre: Catholicism, F/M, Mutilation, Necrophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:55:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26253010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elijah_was_a_prophet/pseuds/elijah_was_a_prophet
Summary: The saint, defiled.
Relationships: Undead Catholic Saint Used For Relics/Lecherous Priest
Comments: 7
Kudos: 12
Collections: Darkest Night 2020





	It Is Truly Fitting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CorpseBrigadier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/gifts).



_ What grace is meant to do is to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in  _ _ faith. - _ _ Augustus of Hippo _

In life she had been known as Philomena, and her life had been unremarkable up until the day she let her body be pierced by a hundred arrows than let it suffer Diocletian’s touch. Surrender to the pagan would have been no better than death, and in her agonies she saw seven angels bend to clean her wounds and promise her a seat in the world to come. For as she was Christ’s bride so Christ was her groom, and in his mansions she and the other sanctified saints would sit in eternal bliss.

After her death, however, she sat in a great darkness, and her body felt nowhere to be found. The angels had promised her three days of prison and then forty more before she saw his blessed face. But in the deep void forty days felt so eternally long. A great deal of it she spent in mind-sleep, meditating on the sorrows of the Virgin, feeling her agonies so acutely  it gave her body shape again. 

Light came eventually. Her body did as well, and for a moment she was confused- was there to be no period between her stay in heaven and the resurrection of all saints? And the people who she saw were not godly looking ones. They were roughshod men in bizarre clothes who spoke a language like Latin that she still could not understand. One had a lantern like a teardrop.

They touched her wounds and their fingers came away wet not with blood but with a clear fluid which smelled of flowers and incense. A sacred sign. The bodies of the saints did not rot or corrupt and so hers was perfectly preserved while simultaneously immobile. She could feel their touches down her arms and up her legs, pulling the ancient scraps of her burial cloth off and then pulling a sheet across her face. When they carried  her she was limp and her head bobbed up and down like the swaying neck of a camel.

A box. The swaying of a cart. Thin, cold mountain air. Background yelling and grunting and cries of men. She tried to puzzle all of these things together through supplications to her groom Jesus Christ, and his mother the Virgin Mary, and her father-in-law who set the heavens and the earth. She knew she was owed an answer no more than Job was owed an end to his suffering but she was frightened by the faces who slid open the lid of her coffin while it was dark and moved in strokes down her body. They had to regularly change her wrappings as they grew soaked from the anointing oil which seeped from her wounds.

The first time she heard speech in a language she could understand she tried to weep.

“It’s a saint,  Fredrich . We can’t let it sit out in the street.”

“But my back’s bad, and I can’t-”

“Then go fetch one of the stable boys! Even in Jerusalem they keep their relics in safe places.”

Silence for a few minutes, then being gently lifted. The noise of the street faded away to only hard shoes on stone flooring. She was set gently on something soft, and her lid was slid open with a rush of cool air. Two men were before her, one old and hunched and the other upright with a fair face and brown hair that hung to his chin. They each had soft hands when they touched her preserved body, unlike the hands of those who’d transported her and poked at her wounds.

“She’d beautiful,” the brown-haired man said, stroking her hair back from her face. “Like the Virgin herself.”

“Yes, hm. But her wounds are a bit unsightly.”

“Those are miracles, Justus. See how the flesh remains bright and not infected or discolored, how not blood but sweet oil flows. Even if she arrived in a thousand  pieces I would still have her put in the central chapel. As she  is she’ll make a fine arrangement, and if we were to give her relics to the  provincial churches-”

“-then faith might flourish where the dissidents seek to extinguish it. I understand.”

“But for now I think we should lay her rest.”

The lid was closed and Philomela was borne in silence to somewhere dark inside the church.

“You can return to your manuscripts, Fredrich. I’ll take care of her.”

“But where will the adornments go?”

“Think about it this way. The Church gains power and money through the sale of relics, correct?”

“You worry me.”

“And the body which they reported finding surely wouldn’t be look amiss at if it was missing a few pieces. That was what we’d been  anticipating .”

“Joachim, you can’t-”

“And who will know?”

There was silence. “I suppose no one, except us two.”

“Three. Although I don’t think a saint would mind seeing her body be put towards good works.”

Some inaudible signal passed between them and then Philomela was alone with Joachim. He took her gently from her box and set her on a table draped in canvas, tossing aside the sticky linen she’d been sitting in to show her limbs bare. Her matted hair hung around her body, dusty and dirty, while her limbs were gummed and caked in filth from the tomb where she’d lain. 

“A thread of scarlet,” Joachim said, and ran his fingers across her lips. His hands were warm, but not in the stifling way that her trip had been. Dead as it was her body couldn’t regulate its own temperature, and so it had swung between heat and cold as she was in the box. It was now cold in the dimness of the church, cold as the rain she could distantly hear from the outside.

From a basin of  water he wiped her clean, gentle like her limbs were made of glass panes. He washed her and left her skin to cool, scrubbed oil off and left her wounds bare. Many cut down to the bone and these he kissed. 

The largest was through the side of her ribcage, and this one he pressed his fingers into.

“Like Christ,” he said, moving his fingers and finding them slick with oil. It was not like pain but more like fullness, the unnerving sensation of having a hand fight its way towards her heart from the outside. Into the sensation she fell, until he removed his fingers and slid up towards her body to her breasts.

_ God please,  _ she thought.  _ God please let him stop. Holy Virgin Mother protect me, for I cannot protect myself. Grant that I may not- _

He kissed her on the mouth. Whispered beloved into her ear. Her entire body screamed in horror but he continued to kiss down the side of her limp neck, pinch her nipples which couldn’t stiffen. 

“I want to have you whole before I take the relics,” he said, pulling her thighs apart. If she had feeling in her body  left she might have closed them, but as it  stood she was helpless. Her virginity, preserved for however many years, was to be taken by a handsome and terrible man. 

Without blood flow she couldn’t even take natural pleasure from it, and he had to wet his cock with the wound in her upper thigh which cut to the femur. It ached to be filled so, made her scream inside her own mind until there was no rational thought. Like Dinah the daughter of Leah she was to be defiled, but this time no brothers would come to save her honor.

“Beloved,” he whispered into her ear before slipping into a language she didn’t know, head buried in her hair which she was once proud of. Her entire body was an aching wound. Once he  finished he rolled off of her and kissed the wound in her throat, tonguing it so she could feel him touch her larynx. 

_ God, I would have resisted had I known how. Lord, please forgive me as you forgave those women given over to pagans and barbarians who cried out in the field but were not heard. _

Joachim held a blade, and he cut her left pinky and ring finger off. They had been shattered by an arrow and the flesh barely hung on; he parred the flesh from the bones and dropped them in a basin of salt to dry. Myrrh flowed freely from her hand onto the floor. In response he lifted a finger of gold filigree and slotted it over the wound. A clever clamp lay hidden in the base- if she’d been a skeleton it would have gripped her bones but here  it pinched her flesh.

“No sense in wasting what the craftsmen made.” He felt up her arm, stopping only when he reached a small wound. “Ah, you’ll like this one. Once we found out we were receiving a weeping saint I contracted a friend of mine who specializes in unusual goods. He sent over a great length of sheep-gut tubing, and with any luck this will empty into a basin so we can bottle and sell saint’s oil to the pilgrims. You’re going to be a real attraction, sweetness.”

_ I pray God throws you in the furnace with a bevy of demons. _

That raised a concern for her, though- if God hadn’t fulfilled his promises to her than how would she know that Joachim would receive just punishment for his defilement and mutilation of her body? Even if holy people made it to this place of worship, they would be deceived by the sight of a supposed elect preserved by their Lord’s grace and not pray that she be destroyed. For destruction of the body was the only way out, she felt, complete destruction and not the partial cutting that Joachim enacted upon her limbs.

He cut through her flesh, and threw it to the floor so there were only the bones. Elegant cages of gold covered her exposed ribs, the jut of her right ulna, the gap along her cheek where an arrow exposed her teeth. At other wounds he attached more tubes to empty their weeping beneath her resting place. All during this work he kissed her cold flesh. Hot fingers went into her wounds and she felt her eyes ache where tears should have flowed.

“The glassmakers made a box for you etched with Madonna’s lilies in celebration of your virginity. If only they knew!”

A soft kiss was pressed to her inner thigh.

“The dress they made you is nothing more than an illusion-a piece of cloth in the shape of one, easy to pick up and take off. No one stays in the sanctuary overnight except for me and Fredrich, and he’s half deaf.”

Arranged, beautified, carved, and surrounded by flowers Philomela lay on the table. Her wounds decorated and covered, the shame of where she’d been defiled hidden under lengths of blue silk, she wished only that someone would pull her eyes closed so she didn’t have to see her own torments.

_ Oh _ _ that I might have my desire, and that God would grant me the thing that I long for! That is, that God would destroy me: that he would let his hand go, and cut me off. Then should I yet have comfort, (though I burn with sorrow, let him not spare) because I have not denied the words of the Holy One. _


End file.
